When we asked our customers in 2020 what business success looks like to them, it’s not surprising to see 91% respond, “providing the best quality care to patients” but it was surprising to see 79% of people respond “Having a good work/life balance”.
In 2021, the best quality of care and a greater work/life balance are only achieved with a patient-centric, data-driven, and personalised approach to healthcare technology and practice management – and one that can only exist in the cloud.
What does business success look like?
The healthcare industry notoriously lags behind other industries when faced with adopting new technologies. Moving Practice Management Software (PMS) to the cloud is no exception. In fact, we haven’t seen a significant increase in demand since 2018, when we first asked people using Genie, our desktop PMS, when they would like to move to the cloud and the percentage of people who don’t ever want to move to the cloud has remained exactly the same. It’s safe to say we’re a cautious bunch.
Moving to the cloud
With increasingly robust Security infrastructure offered by big-time players like Amazon Web Services (AWS), massive cost-savings on IT infrastructure, and the flexibility and modern user experiences to support shifting patient expectations – it’s only a matter of time until the penny drops.
Benefits of moving to the cloud
Security of Health Data in the Cloud
Data security has long posed a threat to healthcare because of the increasing sophistication and volume of cyberattacks, resulting in data breaches and tens of millions of dollars in fines. We can now make the argument that health data is more secure in the cloud.
Providers like AWS are entirely dedicated to cloud infrastructure, and their environments provide military-grade security – and we mean that literally – because the Australian Military employs AWS to protect their data. They have the global footprint, the teams, the expertise, the time and the capital to keep pace with new, emerging and evolving security threats – far more than hospitals, health systems or practices alone.
Infrastructure
Many practices employ a third-party IT consultant who may have spent their entire working career building data-centres, employing talent, and fitting out practices with desktop computers and equipment – they’re unlikely to want to dismantle a business they’ve spent years building.
But a shift to the cloud reduces both the upfront and ongoing investment in servers, hardware and manual software updates. A strategic shift is needed, so IT providers can begin to solve higher-value problems for practices, in place of the underlying IT infrastructure that is fast becoming better served by modern technologies.
A climate for innovation
Beyond security and cost of ownership, public cloud infrastructure can increase the pace of innovation. Software can be built far more efficiently when employing the multitude of services offered by the large cloud infrastructure providers.
For example, advances in machine learning will require the capabilities and services available via the cloud, including unlimited computational power and mature machine learning frameworks. To build this from scratch is a huge undertaking and would result in delays to releasing new functionality and features.
